Forum Discussion
Why is Excel treating text as numbers?
Fsim Since you say you can't edit the values, I assume they come from some kind of import. If so, where from? Upon importing data from e.g. a txt or csv file you need to explicitly indicate the data type of the columns that get imported.
Try this. Select the ID column. On the data ribbon, select Text-to-columns. Advance to step 3 changing nothing. In step 3, set the column data format to Text and press Finish. That should solve the problem.
Try a Custom Sort. Perhaps that works for you. Let's assume your ProductID's (before sorting and make sure that they are all texts) look like this:
Custom Sort as shown above and press OK to get this:
Now select the second sort options in the Sort Warning and press OK to get this:
As long as all ProductID's are really texts you should get the correct order. If not, best to start a new thread and share an example (upload an xlsx file or share a link that gives access to it on OneDrive or similar).